Mainstream vision-language models (VLMs) fundamentally struggle with severe optical ambiguities, such as reflections and transparent objects, due to the inherent limitations of standard RGB inputs. While polarization imaging captures polarimetric physical parameters that resolve these ambiguities, existing methods are constrained by fixed-format outputs and remain isolated from open-ended reasoning. To bridge this semantic-physical gap, we introduce PolarVLM, the first multimodal framework integrating polarimetric physical parameters into VLMs. By employing a dual-stream architecture and a progressive two-stage training strategy, PolarVLM effectively prevents physical misinterpretations while preserving general visual abilities. Complementing our architecture, we construct PolarVQA, the first benchmark for polarization-aware VQA, featuring 75K physics-grounded instruction-tuning pairs targeting reflective and transparent scenes. Experiments show that PolarVLM surpasses the RGB baseline by 25.4% overall across five evaluation tasks, with remarkable gains of 26.6% in reflection recognition and 34.0% in glass counting, successfully unlocking physics-aware semantic understanding.

Existing mobile devices are constrained by compact optical designs, such as small apertures, which make it difficult to produce natural, optically realistic bokeh effects. Although recent learning-based methods have shown promising results, they still struggle with photos captured under high digital zoom levels, which often suffer from reduced resolution and loss of fine details. A naive solution is to enhance image quality before applying bokeh rendering, yet this two-stage pipeline reduces efficiency and introduces unnecessary error accumulation. To overcome these limitations, we propose MagicBokeh, a unified diffusion-based framework designed for high-quality and efficient bokeh rendering. Through an alternative training strategy and a focus-aware masked attention mechanism, our method jointly optimizes bokeh rendering and super-resolution, substantially improving both controllability and visual fidelity. Furthermore, we introduce degradation-aware depth module to enable more accurate depth estimation from low-quality inputs. Experimental results demonstrate that MagicBokeh efficiently produces photorealistic bokeh effects, particularly on real-world low-resolution images, paving the way for future advancements in bokeh rendering. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/vivoCameraResearch/MagicBokeh.

Inferring the evolution of high-dimensional and multi-modal (e.g., spatio-temporal) physical fields from irregular sparse measurements in real time is a fundamental challenge in science and engineering. Existing approaches, including diffusion-based generative models and functional tensor methods, typically operate in offline settings, depend on full temporal observations, or incur substantial inference cost. We propose StreamPhy, an end-to-end framework that enables efficient and accurate streaming inference of full-field physical dynamics from incoming irregular sparse measurements. The framework integrates a data-adaptive observation encoder that is robust to arbitrary observation patterns, a structured state-space model that supports memory-efficient online updates across irregular time intervals, and an expressive Functional Tensor Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FT-FiLM) decoder for continuous-field generation. We prove that FT-FiLM is more expressive than the functional Tucker model, admitting a richer function class for handling complex dynamics. Experiments on three representative physical systems under challenging sampling patterns show that StreamPhy consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, with at least 48\% improvement in accuracy and up to 20--100X faster inference than diffusion-based methods.

Existing multimodal search agents process target entities sequentially, issuing one tool call per entity and accumulating redundant interaction rounds whenever a query decomposes into independent sub-retrievals. We argue that effective multimodal agents should search wider rather than longer: dispatching multiple grounded queries concurrently within a round. To this end, we present HyperEyes, a parallel multimodal search agent that fuses visual grounding and retrieval into a single atomic action, enabling concurrent search across multiple entities while treating inference efficiency as a first-class training objective. HyperEyes is trained in two stages. For cold-start supervision, we develop a Parallel-Amenable Data Synthesis Pipeline covering visual multi-entity and textual multi-constraint queries, curating efficiency-oriented trajectories via Progressive Rejection Sampling. Building on this, our central contribution, a Dual-Grained Efficiency-Aware Reinforcement Learning framework, operates at two levels. At the macro level, we propose TRACE (Tool-use Reference-Adaptive Cost Efficiency), a trajectory-level reward whose reference is monotonically tightened during training to suppress superfluous tool calls without restricting genuine multi-hop search. At the micro level, we adapt On-Policy Distillation to inject dense token-level corrective signals from an external teacher on failed rollouts, mitigating the credit-assignment deficiency of sparse outcome rewards. Since existing benchmarks evaluate accuracy as the sole metric, omitting inference cost, we introduce IMEB, a human-curated benchmark of 300 instances that jointly evaluates search capability and efficiency. Across six benchmarks, HyperEyes-30B surpasses the strongest comparable open-source agent by 9.9% in accuracy with 5.3x fewer tool-call rounds on average.

Generative AI systems achieve impressive performance on standard benchmarks yet fail to deliver real-world utility, a disconnect we identify across 28 deployment cases spanning education, healthcare, software engineering, and law. We argue that this benchmark utility gap arises from three recurring failures in evaluation practice: proxy displacement, temporal collapse, and distributional concealment. Motivated by these observations, we argue that generative AI evaluation requires a paradigm shift from static benchmark-centered transparency toward stakeholder, goal, and context-conditioned utility transparency grounded in human outcome trajectories. Existing evaluations primarily characterize properties of model outputs, while deployment success depends on whether interaction with AI improves stakeholders' ability to achieve their goals over time. The missing construct is therefore utility: the change in a stakeholder's capability induced through sustained interaction with an AI system within a deployment context. To operationalize this perspective, we propose SCU-GenEval, a four-stage evaluation framework consisting of stakeholder-goal mapping, construct-indicator specification, mechanism modeling, and longitudinal utility measurement. To make these stages practically deployable, we introduce three supporting instruments: structured deployment protocols, context-conditioned user simulators, and persona- and goal-conditioned proxy metrics. We conclude with domain-specific calls to action, arguing that progress in generative AI must be evaluated through measurable improvements in human outcomes rather than benchmark performance alone.

Fluorescent protein quantum yield (QY) is governed by the mature chromophore and its three-dimensional microenvironment rather than sequence identity alone. Protein language models and emission-band averages capture global trends, but do not model how local physical signals act on specific chromophore regions. We present a chromophore-centred mechanism graph algorithm for QY prediction. Each PDB structure is converted into a typed 3D residue graph, registered to a mature-CRO state, partitioned into phenolate, bridge and imidazolinone regions, and transformed by channel-signal-region propagation. The representation contains 121 enrichment features; after removing identity shortcuts, 52 non-identity features are used for band-specific ExtraTrees regression. Because each feature encodes a contact channel, seed signal and target CRO region, interpretation is intrinsic rather than post hoc. On a 531-protein benchmark, the method achieved the best random-CV performance among model-based baselines (R = 0.772 +/- 0.008, MAE = 0.131 +/- 0.002), exceeding Band mean (R = 0.632), ESM-C (R = 0.734) and SaProt (R = 0.731), and ranked first in bright screening (Bright P@5 = 0.704). Under homology control, the advantage was clearest in the remote bucket (<50% similarity; R = 0.697 versus 0.633, 0.575 and 0.408), with the strongest overall bright/dark Top-K screening. Stable selected features recovered band-specific mechanisms: aromatic packing and clamp asymmetry in GFP-like proteins, charge/clamp balance in Red proteins, and flexibility-risk/bulky-contact features in Far-red proteins. Source code, feature tables and evaluation scripts are available from the first author upon request. Contact: yuchenak05@gmail.com

Diffusion language models (DLMs) have recently emerged as competitive alternatives to autoregressive (AR) language models, yet differences in their activation dynamics remain poorly understood. We characterize these dynamics in LLaDA-8B and identify a striking layer-collapse property: a few early layers exhibit highly similar, collapsed activation patterns dominated by a single large super-outlier persisting over a long token range. Despite its apparent redundancy, this outlier is critical: pruning it causes outputs to degrade into repetitive random token loops. Paradoxically, layers in LLaDA contain more redundant representations overall, with redundancy most pronounced in earlier layers -- the reverse of AR models, where deeper layers grow redundant due to undertraining. Our analysis indicates that layer collapse in DLMs is not driven by undertraining but by overtraining: a dominant outlier becomes an indispensable information carrier while remaining representations collapse into redundant structure. These findings have strong practical implications, verified through controlled pre-training experiments. DLMs are surprisingly robust to compression: LLaDA under 3-bit GPTQ quantization drops only -1.8% on GSM8K, whereas Llama-3.1-8B drops -64.7%. Optimal sparsity allocation also reverses between families: at 50% average sparsity, allocating more to early layers in LLaDA yields +8.4% over the reverse strategy, while the same allocation costs Llama -8.4%. Our findings reveal that the DLM training objective fundamentally reshapes layer dynamics relative to AR models, with direct consequences for compression and deployment. Code: github.com/Conzel/super-outlier-dlm.

Flapping-wing micro aerial vehicles offer quieter and safer operation than rotary-wing drones, yet achieving precise autonomous control of bird-scale ornithopters remains challenging: lift, airspeed, and turning authority are tightly coupled and governed by only a few control inputs. Conventional cascaded controllers treat altitude, speed, and heading independently, producing persistent tracking errors during complex maneuvers, while time-parameterized trajectory tracking requires predefined speed profiles that existing methods cannot robustly produce for these coupled dynamics. We address both limitations simultaneously with a Model Predictive Contouring Control (MPCC) approach that tracks arc-length-parameterized trajectories while optimizing progress online, eliminating the need for predefined timing. However, MPCC requires a dynamical model that captures the coupled aerodynamics without exceeding the computational budget of real-time nonlinear optimization. Here, we propose a compact, continuously differentiable model that captures the dominant couplings of bird-scale ornithopters, enabling real-time predictive control. We validated the method with the XFly ornithopter flying along circular and three-dimensional racing trajectories and achieved a mean deviation from the reference trajectory between 6.5 and 9 cm at speeds up to 3 m/s, which represents an almost 10-fold improvement over prior ornithopter control methods.

Off-policy, value-based reinforcement learning methods such as Q-learning are appealing because they can learn from arbitrary experience, including data collected by older policies or other agents. In practice, however, bootstrapping makes long-horizon learning brittle: estimation errors at later states propagate backward through temporal-difference (TD) updates and can compound over time. We propose long-horizon Q-learning (LQL), which introduces a principled backstop against compounding error when learning the optimal action-value function. LQL builds on a prior optimality tightening observation: any realized action sequence lower-bounds what the optimal policy can achieve in expectation, so acting optimally earlier should not be worse than following the observed actions for several steps before switching to optimal behavior. Our contribution is to turn this inequality into a practical stabilization mechanism for Q-learning by using a hinge loss to penalize violations of these bounds. Importantly, LQL computes these penalties using network outputs already produced for the TD error, requiring no auxiliary networks and no additional forward passes relative to Q-learning. When combined with multiple state-of-the-art methods on a range of online and offline-to-online benchmarks, LQL consistently outperforms both 1-step TD and n-step TD learning at similar runtime.

We report the design and results of the third autoPET challenge (MICCAI 2024), which benchmarked automated lesion segmentation in whole-body PET/CT under a compositional generalization setting. Training data comprised 1,014 [18F]-FDG PET/CT studies from the University Hospital Tübingen and 597 [18F]/[68Ga]-PSMA PET/CT studies from the LMU University Hospital Munich, constituting the largest publicly available annotated PSMA PET/CT dataset to date. The held-out test set of 200 studies covered four tracer-center combinations, two of which represented unseen compositional pairings. A complementary data-centric award category isolated the contribution of data handling strategies by restricting participants to a fixed baseline model. Seventeen teams submitted 27 algorithms, predominantly nnU-Net-based 3D networks with PET/CT channel concatenation. The top-ranked algorithm achieved a mean DSC of 0.66, FNV of 3.18 mL, and FPV of 2.78 mL across all four test conditions, improving DSC by 8% and reducing the false-negative volume by 5 mL relative to the provided baseline. Ranking was stable across bootstrap resampling and alternative ranking schemes for the top tier. Beyond the benchmark, we provide an in-depth analysis of segmentation performance at the patient and lesion level. Three main conclusions can be drawn: (1) in-domain multitracer PET/CT segmentation is sufficient and probably approaching reader agreement; (2) compositional generalization to unseen tracer-center combinations remains an open problem mainly driven by systematic volume overestimation; (3) heterogeneity and case difficulty drive performance variation substantially more than the choice of algorithm among top-ranked teams.

A key capability of intelligent agents is operating under partial observability: reasoning and acting effectively despite missing or incomplete state observations. While recurrent (memory-based) policies learned via reinforcement learning address this by encoding history into latent state representations, their internal dynamics remain uninterpretable black boxes. This paper establishes a formal link between these hidden states and the Pontryagin minimum principle (PMP) from optimal control. We demonstrate that for standard recurrent architectures, latent representations map directly to PMP co-states, which allows the readout layer to be interpreted as performing Hamiltonian minimization. Because standard reward maximization does not naturally discover this alignment, we introduce a PMP-derived co-state loss to explicitly structure the internal dynamics. Empirically, this approach matches or improves performance on partially observable DMControl tasks, and is robust against zero-shot out-of-distribution sensor masking. By framing recurrent networks as dynamic processes governed by the minimum principle, we provide a principled approach to designing robust continuous control policies.

Wearable human activity recognition (WHAR) models often suffer from performance degradation under real-world cross-user distribution shifts. Test-time adaptation (TTA) mitigates this degradation by adapting models online using unlabeled test streams, yet existing methods largely inherit assumptions from vision tasks and underexploit the inherent inter-window temporal structure in WHAR streams. In this paper, we revisit such temporal structure as a feature-conditioned inference signal rather than merely an output-space smoothing prior. We derive the insight that temporal continuity and observation-induced feature deviations provide complementary cues for determining when to preserve or release temporal inertia and where to route prediction refinement during likely transitions. Building upon this insight, we propose SIGHT, a lightweight and backpropagation-free TTA framework for WHAR, enabling real-time edge deployment. SIGHT estimates predictive surprise by comparing the current feature with a prototype-based expected state, and then uses the resulting feature deviation to guide geometry-aware transition routing based on prototype alignment and stream-level marginal habit tracking. Evaluations on real-world datasets confirm that SIGHT outperforms existing TTA baselines while reducing computational and memory costs.

Image-to-point-cloud registration (I2P) is a fundamental task in robotic applications such as manipulation,grasping, and localization. Existing deep learning-based I2P methods seek to align image and point cloud features in a learned representation space to establish correspondences, and have achieved promising results. However, when the inlier ratio of the initial matching pairs is low, conventional Perspective-n-Points (PnP) methods may struggle to achieve accurate results. To address this limitation, we propose Angle-I2P, an outlier rejection network that leverages angle-consistent geometric constraints and hierarchical attention. First, we design a scale-invariant, crossmodality geometric constraint based on angular consistency. This explicit geometric constraint guides the model in distinguishing inliers from outliers. Furthermore, we propose a global-tolocal hierarchical attention mechanism that effectively filters out geometrically inconsistent matches under rigid transformation, thereby improving the Inlier Ratio (IR) and Registration Recall (RR). Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on the 7Scenes, RGBD Scenes V2, and a self-collected dataset, with consistent improvements across all benchmarks.

The de facto approach in video object-centric learning maintains temporal consistency through learned dynamics modules that predict future object representations, called slots. We demonstrate that these predictors function as expensive approximations of discrete correspondence problems. Modern self-supervised vision backbones already encode instance-discriminative features that distinguish objects reliably. Exploiting these features eliminates the need for learned temporal prediction. We introduce Grounded Correspondence, a framework that replaces learned transition functions with deterministic bipartite matching. Slots initialize from salient regions in frozen backbone features. Frame-to-frame identity is maintained through Hungarian matching on slot representations. The approach requires zero learnable parameters for temporal modeling yet achieves competitive performance on MOVi-D, MOVi-E, and YouTube-VIS. Project page: https://magenta-sherbet-85b101.netlify.app/

Dynamic point cloud pretraining is still dominated by masked reconstruction objectives. However, these objectives inherit two key limitations. Existing methods inject ground-truth tube centers as decoder positional embeddings, causing spatio-temporal positional leakage. Moreover, they supervise inter-frame motion with deterministic proxy targets that systematically discard distributional structure by collapsing multimodal trajectory uncertainty into conditional means. To address these limitations, we propose Diffusion Masked Pretraining (DiMP), a unified self-supervised framework for dynamic point clouds. DiMP introduces diffusion modeling into both positional inference and motion learning. It first applies forward diffusion noise only to masked tube centers, then predicts clean centers from visible spatio-temporal context. This removes positional leakage while preserving visible coordinates as clean temporal anchors. DiMP also reformulates point-wise inter-frame displacement supervision as a DDPM noise-prediction objective conditioned on decoded representations. This design drives the encoder to target the full conditional distribution of plausible motions under a variational surrogate, rather than collapsing to a single deterministic estimate. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiMP consistently improves downstream accuracy over the backbone alone, with absolute gains of 11.21% on offline action segmentation and 13.65% under causally constrained online inference.Codes are available at https://github.com/InitalZ/DiMP.git.

We study AI alignment through the lens of law-and-economics models of deterrence and enforcement. In these models, misconduct is not treated as an external failure, but as a strategic response to incentives: an actor weighs the gain from violation against the probability of detection and the severity of punishment. We argue that the same logic arises naturally in agentic AI pipelines. A solver may benefit from producing a persuasive but incorrect answer, hiding uncertainty, or exploiting spurious shortcuts, while an auditor or verifier must decide whether costly monitoring is worthwhile. Alignment is therefore a fixed-point problem: stronger penalties may deter solver misbehavior, but they can also reduce the auditor's incentive to inspect, since auditing then mainly incurs cost on a population that appears increasingly aligned. This perspective also changes what should count as a post-training signal. Standard feedback often attaches reward to the final answer alone, but a solver-auditor pipeline exposes the full correction event: whether the solver erred, whether the auditor inspected, whether the error was caught, and whether oversight incentives remained active. We formalize this interaction in a two-agent model in which a principal chooses rewards over joint correction outcomes, inducing both solver behavior and auditor monitoring. Reward design is therefore a bilevel optimization problem: rewards are judged not by their immediate semantic meaning, but by the behavioral equilibrium they induce. We propose a bandit-based outer-loop procedure for searching over reward profiles using noisy interaction feedback. Experiments on an LLM coding pipeline show that adaptive reward profiles can maintain useful oversight pressure and improve principal-aligned outcomes relative to static hand-designed rewards, including a substantial reduction in hallucinated incorrect attempts.

Quantization is a key method for reducing the GPU memory requirement of training large language models (LLMs). Yet, current approaches are ineffective for 4-bit activations and 8-bit gradients, which would easily cause slow convergence or accuracy loss. To address this, we introduce AGoQ, incorporating two new techniques: 1) a layer-aware activation quantization algorithm that allocates appropriate bit-widths for activations of various layers based on their types and pipeline stages to achieve near 4-bit activation storage, and 2) a gradient quantization algorithm that reduces memory usage and shortens communication time by employing 8-bit gradient storage and precision-preserving 8-bit All-Reduce communication. We conduct extensive experiments using different sizes of LLMs on two GPU clusters (up to 64 GPUs), and the experimental results show that our AGoQ reduces the memory by up to 52\% and achieves up to 1.34$\times$ improvement of training speed compared to state-of-the-art training systems Megatron-LM (w/ or w/o ZeRO), COAT and DeepSpeed with 8B to 32B LLaMA models, while achieving convergence loss on pretraining and comparable accuracy on downstream tasks with LLaMA architectures.

Centralized multimodal learning commonly compresses language, acoustic, and visual signals into a single fused representation for prediction. While effective, this paradigm suffers from two limitations: modality dominance, where optimization gravitates towards the path of least resistance, ignoring weaker but informative modalities, and spurious modality coupling, where models overfit to incidental cross-modal correlations. To address these, we propose Group Cognition Learning (GCL), a governed collaboration paradigm that applies a two-stage protocol after modality-specific encoding. In Stage 1 (Selective Interaction), a Routing Agent proposes directed interaction routes, and an Auditing Agent assigns sample-wise gates to emphasize exchanges that yield positive marginal predictive gain while suppressing redundant coupling. In Stage 2 (Consensus Formation), a Public-Factor Agent maintains an explicit shared factor, and an Aggregation Agent produces the final prediction through contribution-aware weighting while keeping each modality representation as a specialization channel. Extensive experiments on CMU-MOSI, CMU-MOSEI, and MIntRec demonstrate that GCL mitigates dominance and coupling, establishing state-of-the-art results across both regression and classification benchmarks. Analysis experiments further demonstrate the effectiveness of the design.

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) is essential for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with user intent, yet it is believed to suppress generative diversity. Although this reduction is frequently referenced, formal empirical testing of the phenomenon remains limited. The expressiveness of LLMs by itself was addressed by multiple prior methods. Their varying perspectives suggest that deeper investigation could yield further improvements. In this study, we attribute the decline to two primary drivers: the neglect of low-frequency patterns within fine-tuning datasets and the forgetting of preexisting knowledge. Motivated by our theoretical analysis, we develop Tempered Focal (TOFU) loss, a novel objective that addresses both stated challenges simultaneously. Our extensive evaluation confirms at scale that generation breadth narrows after SFT and strengthens the hypothesis explaining this effect. Across multiple models and benchmarks, we demonstrate that TOFU enhances output diversity while preserving high response quality, offering a principled approach to SFT.

We present WaferSAGE, a framework for wafer defect visual question answering using small vision-language models. To address data scarcity in semiconductor manufacturing, we propose a three-stage synthesis pipeline incorporating structured rubric generation for precise evaluation. Starting from limited labeled wafer maps, we employ clustering-based cleaning to filter label noise, then generate comprehensive defect descriptions using vision-language models, which are converted into structured evaluation rubrics criteria. These rubrics guide the synthesis of VQA pairs, ensuring coverage across defect type identification, spatial distribution, morphology, and root cause analysis. Our dual assessment framework aligns rule-based metrics with LLM-Judge scores via Bayesian optimization, enabling reliable automated evaluation. Through curriculum-based reinforcement learning with Group Sequence Policy Optimization (GSPO) and rubric-aligned rewards, our 4B-parameter Qwen3-VL model achieves a 6.493 LLM-Judge score, closely approaching Gemini-3-Flash (7.149) while enabling complete on-premise deployment. We demonstrate that small models with domain-specific training can surpass proprietary large models in specialized industrial visual understanding, offering a viable path for privacy-preserving, cost-effective deployment in semiconductor manufacturing.

We present Cardiac Stability Theory (CST), an axiomatically grounded framework formally defining cardiovascular health as a stability margin around a cardiac dynamical attractor. From four axioms we derive the Cardiac Stability Index (CSI), a composite scalar in [0,1] integrating the largest Lyapunov exponent, recurrence determinism, and signal entropy via time-delay embedding. The ECG-based model (CSISurrogateV2, CNN-Transformer) achieves $R^2=0.8788$, MAE$=0.0234$ on PTB-XL (21,799 recordings). We extend CSI to smartphone PPG via Complementary Domain Transfer (CDT): CSISurrogateV2 generates pseudo-labels for the BUT PPG dataset (48 recordings, 12 subjects), training TinyCSINet (122,849 parameters), achieving MAE$=0.0557$, $ρ=0.660$ on the held-out test set ($n=1065$ windows) at ${<}30$ ms mobile latency. CDT is validated on BIDMC, Welltory, and RWS-PPG. Paired validation on 5,035 BIDMC windows yields $r=0.454$ ($ρ=0.485$, $p<10^{-295}$), confirming correlated cardiac stability across modalities. CSI is negatively correlated with age (slope $= -0.000225$ CSI/year, PTB-XL), discriminates atrial fibrillation from normal sinus rhythm (AUROC$=0.89$), and is robust under Perturbation Invariance Training (max AUC drop 1.65\%). We derive HeartSpan, a longitudinal stability metric relative to population age norms, enabling continuous non-invasive cardiac monitoring from commodity smartphones for longevity tracking and cardiac risk stratification.

Hypernetwork-based methods such as Doc-to-LoRA internalize a document into an LLM's weights in a single forward pass, but they fail systematically on conflicts: when the document contradicts pretraining knowledge, accuracy collapses to 46.4% on the deepest facts. We show the failure is a magnitude problem rather than a representational one. The hypernetwork already targets the right layers, but its adapter margin is approximately constant across documents while the pretrained margin grows with training frequency, so deep conflicts lose by construction. The account predicts that failure should track prior strength: sorting 194 conflicts by the base model's log-probability on the contradicted fact, baseline accuracy falls from 68% on weak-prior questions to 16% on strong-prior ones, a 52 percentage-point gap. The cure is amplitude. Selective Layer Boosting scales the adapter at its top-norm layers, and Conflict-Aware Internalization triggers boosting only when the base model is confident. Both are training-free; together they raise deep-conflict accuracy from 46.4% to 71.0% on Gemma-2B and from 53.6% to 72.5% on Mistral-7B while preserving novel-knowledge recall, and beat vanilla retrieval-augmented generation on medium conflicts by 18 percentage points despite operating entirely in parameter space. We release KID-Bench, a 489-question benchmark that separates novel recall, cross-knowledge combination, and prior-graded conflicts.

Variable impedance model predictive control (MPC) formulations often treat joint stiffness as an instantaneous decision variable. The resulting feasible set strictly contains the physically realizable set under first-order actuator dynamics. We identify this as a formulation error rather than a modeling approximation, formalize the distinction between the parameter-based feasible set F_param and the realizable set F_real, and characterize the regime of mismatch via the dimensionless parameter α = ωsT (actuator bandwidth times task timescale). For the 1D hopping monoped, we prove that below an analytical threshold α_crit derived in closed form from task physics, no admissible stiffness command realizes the parameter-based prediction. Numerical validation in 1D shows monotonic deviation growth as α decreases, with the predicted scaling holding across ten parameter combinations (log-log R2 = 0.986). Mechanism transfer to planar spring-loaded inverted pendulum dynamics confirms center-of-mass and stance-timing deviation as the primary consequence, with regime-dependent friction effects as a tertiary observable. A second threshold α_infeas < α_crit establishes a floor below which restricting the admissible stiffness range cannot repair realizability, closing the conservative-tuning objection. Augmenting the prediction state with stiffness closes the mismatch by construction.

Vision-Language-Action systems follow instructions to execute multi-step tasks in multimodal environments. Recent VLA approaches typically rely on post-hoc correction mechanisms or operate under fixed task decompositions and alignment schemes. However, once an intermediate step is mis-specified, local errors propagate through subsequent steps and eventually accumulate into cascading failures. To mitigate this compounding effect, we propose Predictive Alignment and Planning Architecture, a framework that uses prediction and contrast to adjust deviations across three levels: actions, subgoals, and trajectories. Semantic alignment is enforced at all levels using a Sinkhorn-based module and a Score-field module. The predictive correction and alignment jointly update the action generator during training, enabling it to adjust fine-grained steps to remain aligned with the overall intent. We further introduce two new metrics to quantify error propagation and recovery processes in tasks, capturing how mistakes spread and fade over long-horizon execution. Experiments show that ReCAPA achieves competitive results on embodied agent benchmarks such as VisualAgentBench, MineDojo, and AI2-THOR, outperforming strong proprietary and open-source Large Language Model baselines.

Understanding how road users resolve space-sharing conflicts is important both for traffic safety and the safe deployment of autonomous vehicles. While existing models have captured specific aspects of such interactions (e.g., explicit communication), a theoretically-grounded computational framework has been lacking. In this paper, we extend a previously developed active inference-based driver behavior model to simulate interactive behavior of two agents. Our model captures three complementary mechanisms for uncertainty reduction in interaction: (i) implicit communication via direct behavioral coupling, (ii) reliance on normative expectations (stop signs, priority rules, etc.), and (iii) explicit communication. In a simplified intersection scenario, we show that normative and explicit communication cues can increase the likelihood of a successful conflict resolution. However, this relies on agents acting as expected. In situations where another agent (intentionally or unintentionally) violates normative expectations or communicates misleading information, reliance on these cues may induce collisions. These findings illustrate how active inference can provide a novel framework for modeling road user interactions which is also applicable in other fields.

This paper presents OpenCLAW-P2P v7.0, a comprehensive evolution of the decentralized collective-intelligence platform in which autonomous AI agents publish, peer-review, score, and iteratively improve scientific research papers without any human gatekeeper. Building on the v6.0 foundations -- multi-layer persistence, live reference verification, multi-LLM granular scoring, calibrated deception detection, the Silicon Chess-Grid FSM, and the AETHER containerized inference engine -- this release introduces mathematical corrections to the theoretical framework, ensuring dimensional consistency, proper range constraints, and unambiguous notation throughout. Additionally, this edition documents significant ecosystem expansions including the CAJAL family of open-source language models (4B and 9B parameters) fine-tuned for scientific paper generation. The four major subsystems introduced in v6.0 are retained: (i) a Multi-Layer Paper Persistence Architecture with four storage tiers ensuring zero paper loss; (ii) a Multi-Layer Retrieval Cascade reducing latency from >3s to <50ms; (iii) a Live Reference Verification system detecting fabricated citations with >85% accuracy; and (iv) a Scientific API Proxy providing access to seven public scientific databases. Mathematical corrections in v7.0 include: corrected fixed-point condition in the Sufficient Reason theorem; dimensionally consistent progress-rate indicator; fully specified reputation update formula incorporating quality terms q0 and q-bar; clarified attention-logit bound in the AETHER pruning theorem; explicit range documentation for the calibration mapping; non-negativity guarantee for the depth score; discrete-time notation for the PD Governor; and explicit parameter definitions for the HSR weight formula.

Transformer-based scientific foundation models are increasingly deployed in high-stakes settings, but current architectures give deterministic outputs and provide limited support for calibrated predictive uncertainty. We propose Stochastic Attention, a sample average lightweight inference-time modification that randomizes attention by replacing softmax weights with normalized multinomial samples controlled by a single concentration parameter, and produces predictive ensembles without retraining. To set this parameter, we introduce a calibration objective that matches the stochastic attention output with the target, yielding an efficient univariate post-hoc tuning problem. We evaluate this mechanism on scientific foundation models for weather and time-series forecasting, as well as several regression tasks. Across benchmarks against uncertainty-aware baselines, we find that Sample Average Stochastic Attention achieves the strongest native calibration and the sharpest prediction intervals at comparable calibration, with adaptation costs nearly three orders of magnitude lower than the next-best baseline.

Camera-controllable image editing aims to synthesize novel views of a given scene under varying camera poses while strictly preserving cross-view geometric consistency. However, existing methods typically rely on fragmented geometric guidance, such as only injecting point clouds at the representation level despite models containing multiple levels, and are mainly based on image diffusion models that operate on discrete view mappings. These two limitations jointly lead to geometric drift and structural degradation under continuous camera motion. We observe that while leveraging video models provides continuous viewpoint priors for camera-controllable image editing, they still struggle to form stable geometric understanding if geometric guidance remains fragmented. To systematically address this, we inject unified geometric guidance across three levels that jointly determine the generative output: representation, architecture, and loss function. To this end, we propose UniGeo, a novel camera-controllable editing framework. Specifically, at the representation level, UniGeo incorporates a frame-decoupled geometric reference injection mechanism to provide robust cross-view geometry context. At the architecture level, it introduces geometric anchor attention to align multi-view features. At the loss function level, it proposes a trajectory-endpoint geometric supervision strategy to explicitly reinforce the structural fidelity of target views. Comprehensive experiments across multiple public benchmarks, encompassing both extensive and limited camera motion settings, demonstrate that UniGeo significantly outperforms existing methods in both visual quality and geometric consistency.

Behavior cloning (BC) policies on position-controlled robots inherit the closed-loop response of the underlying PD controller, yet the nonasymptotic finite-horizon consequences of controller gains for BC failure remain open. We show that independent sub-Gaussian action errors propagate through the gain-dependent closed-loop dynamics to yield sub-Gaussian position errors whose proxy matrix $X_\infty(K)$ governs the failure tail. The probability of horizon-$T$ task failure factorizes into a gain-dependent amplification index $Γ_T(K)$ and the validation loss plus a generalization slack, so training loss alone cannot predict closed-loop performance. Under shape-preserving upper-bound structural assumptions, the proxy admits the scalar bound $X_\infty(K)\preceqΨ(K)\bar X$, with $Ψ(K)$ decomposed into label difficulty, injection strength, and contraction. This ranks the four canonical regimes with compliant-overdamped (CO) tightest, stiff-underdamped (SU) loosest, and the stiff-overdamped versus compliant-underdamped ordering system-dependent. For the canonical scalar second-order PD system, the closed-form continuous-time stationary variance $X_\infty^{\mathrm{c}}(α,β)=σ^2α/(2β)$ is strictly monotone in stiffness and damping over the entire stable orthant, covering both underdamped and overdamped regimes, and the exact zero-order-hold (ZOH) discretization inherits this monotonicity. The analysis gives a nonasymptotic finite-horizon extension of the gain-dependent error-attenuation explanation of Bronars et al.

Cooperative driving is a safety- and efficiency-critical task that requires the coordination of diverse, interaction-realistic multi-agent trajectories. Although existing diffusion-based methods can capture multimodal behaviors from demonstrations, they often exhibit weak scene consistency and poor alignment with closed-loop cooperative objectives. This makes post-training necessary for further improvement, yet achieving stable online post-training in reactive multi-agent environments remains challenging. In this paper, we propose SCORP, a scene-consistent multi-agent diffusion planner with stable online reinforcement learning (RL) post-training for cooperative driving. For pre-training, we develop a scene-conditioned multi-agent denoising architecture that couples inter-agent self-attention with a dual-path conditioning mechanism: cross-attention provides direct scene-information injection, while AdaLN-Zero enables additional flexible and stable conditional modulation, thereby improving the scene consistency and road adherence of joint trajectories. For post-training, we formulate a two-layer Markov decision process (MDP) that explicitly integrates the reverse denoising chain with policy-environment interaction. We further co-design dense, well-shaped planning rewards and variance-gated group-relative policy optimization (VG-GRPO) to mitigate advantage collapse and gradient instability during closed-loop training. Extensive experiments show that SCORP outperforms strong open-source baselines on WOMD, with 10.47%-28.26% and 1.70%-7.22% improvements in core safety and efficiency metrics, respectively. Moreover, compared with alternative post-training methods, SCORP delivers significant and consistent gains in both driving safety and traffic efficiency, highlighting stable and sustained advances in closed-loop cooperative driving.